Yael Davids

19 January - 9 March 2013

Diana
Stigter is proud to announce the first solo exhibition of Yael Davids at the
gallery. Her work focuses on the narrative character that is typical of
documentation and repetition. With a strict economy of gesture and an ongoing
interest in the notion of performance, her installations attempt at turning
memories of ephemeral, fleeting presence into a definite shape. Born and raised
in Israel, Davids work emphasizes to the conflicted political history of a
nation-in-the-making, and her own individual biography that has been impacted
by loss and the experience of mourning.

In
the exhibition space, Davids leads us through a rigid ‘spatial choreography’
with breakability and fissure being central themes. A number of sheets of glass
are hanging from the ceiling opposed to two monochrome boards of loam. They
function as a quotation of Davids’ performance ‘Learning to Imitate in
Absentia’. Glass is a material that only recently became part of Davids work.
In the Kibbutz were she was born, a glass factory was founded in 1979.The factory started with the production of window
glass but slowly, as the Palestine-Israeli conflict escalated in subsequent
Intifadas, the demand appeared for thicker and stronger, bulletproof glass,
resistant to machine gun fire and soon even to RPB rockets and bazooka
grenades. While very breakable in itself, the glass shown at the exhibition
space is the only material that is not broken or cracked, but at the same time
they exude a constant suggestion of danger.

Next
to the glass, some objects from an entirely different cultural context are
exposed: Japanese tea bowls made between the 16th and
18th century, so-called “mended ceramics” – a technique describing the art of repairing
broken ceramics by further articulating their fissures with gold fillings, thus
making the repaired object more precious than the new one. By tradition these
objects became a signifier for the appreciation of imperfection through
carefully commissioned skilled labor. Placed within the friction of the bullet proof and the
breakable glass, they gain another layer of meaning: While exposing a great
sensibility, Davids’ installation proposes a lyrical statement that vacillates
between accepting transience of life and holding against it. Above all, it’s
about accepting and integrating the ‘break’. Time and event become part of the
object, and it is this act of tracing and documenting that resonates in Davids’
work.

The act of tracing and
documentation is also evident in the two photographs, which at first sight show
two deserted landscapes: They are images of Bayt Thul, Jerusalem District, and
of Suba, a Palestinian Arab village west of Jerusalem that was depopulated and
destroyed in 1948. The site of the village lies on the summit of a conical hill
called Tel Tzova, and it was exactly there that David’s played when she was a
child without knowing the history of the village itself.

It
is a subtle yet forceful language that Davids’
minimal but highly personal installations convey. Resonating long after,
they unfold the potency of proposing a voice in public discussion.